Reflections

Ann Catherine Jose

How to mock network requests in iOS

One of the challenges of mobile application development is to ensure that the application is resilient to various error responses from the services that are consumed by the application. Mobile devices are more susceptible to network connectivity issues, timeout etc. So we need to take extra care to make sure that we test all error scenarios and handle them in a meaningful manner. What and Why of Mocking Even though we are convinced about the benefits of testing server errors, these services are running in Production serving real customer requests.

Learn GraphQL By Example

I have been using GraphQL in my work project for a few months now and I love it. But all my learnings of this technology have been in a hurry and mainly from a consumption standpoint as a mobile developer. So I wanted to learn it much deeper, tinker with it and finally write this blog to share my learnings and cement my understanding. Finally got the time to do it this weekend.

Swift 4.2 - What's New

In this post, I would like to share what’s new in Swift 4.2. All the code displayed in this post is available at my GitHub repo my-learnings/Swift4.2. Random Number Generation Swift 4.2 added random number generator API to standard library. You can use it on Int, Double, Float, CGFloat and Bool. It also provides a convenient API randomElement which returns a random element from a sequence It also provides the APIs shuffle and shuffled to shuffle a sequence 1 2 let randomInt = Int.

GraceHopper 2018 Highlights

I am at the Houston IAH airport waiting to board the flight to go home after 3 days of inspiration, motivation, technology, friendship and pure awesomeness. Yes, I was at Grace Hopper Celebration 2018 (aka GHC 2018), the world’s biggest gathering of women technologists. This year, GHC has 20,000 attendees representing 90 countries. It was such an inspiring experience for me that I thought I should share my experiences and learnings with you my friends.

Fastlane

Fastlane is a suite of simple yet powerful tools to automate building and releasing iOS and Android apps. It takes care of the mundane tasks of mobile application development like generating screenshots, managing provisioning profiles, code signing, beta deployments and releasing the application. It is very popular in the mobile developer community and the best part - it is completely open source. The Toolchain fastlane comes out-of-the-box with a set of very good tools (better known as actions) such as:

Google IO 2017

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Google I/O last week and absolutely loved it. I learned a lot of things during the three days. Btw, it was tiring too with the continuous sessions and the sunny Sun. This post is an attempt to share the main highlights and the announcements that I found interesting. If you attended the event or watched the sessions online, let me know if there were more things that you found interesting.

TDD in Xcode Playground

I use Xcode playground a lot in order to write code snippets - either to try out something that I read in a blog, or to demonstrate a code improvement that I want to suggest in a code review, or sometimes even to prototype a design before doing the full-blown implementation in Xcode project. During this experimentation phase, the correctness of the code was verified by analyzing the ouput displayed on the right-hand side column of the playground.

Realm Mobile Platform

Realm is a company that I respect a lot because of their support for mobile developers and the open nature nature of their offerings. Their easy-to-use, blazingly fast Mobile database software supports all mobile platforms - iOS, Android, React Native and Xamarin, in Java, ObjC, Swift and C#. That is why I am happy to see that today they announced Realm Mobile Platform that combines Realm client side database with server-side technology (Object Server as they call it).

Display mathematical expressions in blog

As part of my Machine Learning course, I learned a useful trick which I will share hoping that it may help someone or I myself can refer to it later. The problem at hand was how to display the mathematical expressions that calculate cost function, gradient descent etc. in a blog or web page. In OneNote, you can do it using OneNote Equation tool earlier, but I wanted to do the same in my blog posts.

Machine Learning - A new journey

Few weeks ago, I started the Machine Learning course on Coursera by Andrew Ng of Stanford University. The course is great, learning a lot of new concepts. Sometimes it is hard, but it is really fun learning this new topic and brushing up the old Math lessons of Linear Algebra, matrix manipulation and derivatives. The course starts with the basics, including a primer on Linear Algebra (it is optional, but I took it anyway since it has been more than a decade when I learned it in college).